To Cavafy

From the French. 

Such impatience, and for what, if tomorrow 
is only a little boat with no sail or oars, 
a bridge over nothing? Think of the old man 
of Alexandria, of his treasures squirreled 

away in a drawer with keys, leftover flakes of 
tobacco, the weary portrait of a deposed princeling. 
All it took was a car horn honking in the street, 
a livelier step on the stairway 

to wake up the room, the angel's voluptuous 
body, the knife-sharp fragile 
beauty of love, and his voice in the darkness 
like salt 

thrown on a wound, in passing.